This healthcare company can only go upstream with its “you be you” philosophy and collaborative inclinations.

Chase EuJene McCants went conservative when he started work at CoverMyMeds nearly five years ago. He took out his facial piercings. He buttoned up—and tucked in—his shirt, sleeves down to cover his tattoos. The work cover-up was something he was used to from his time “slinging cellphones” as a salesman at Sprint Nextel and AT&T. But as the days passed, McCants started putting his jewelry back in. One hot day, he took off his hooded sweatshirt, exposing his inked skin. And then Michelle Brown, vice president of operations, walked by.

“I was terrified,” McCants recalls. “I went into her office and I was like, ‘I can cover up my tattoo if you want me to, it’s A-OK; I’ve done it for all these years.’ And she was like, ‘No, I think it’s weird you’re even asking.’ And that’s when I was like, ‘This is really different.’ I was used to a corporate environment, and it just wasn’t it. It was a group of people who wanted to get together to change something, and those small rules of how you should look and how you should come off just weren’t there,” says McCants. “So long as we respected each other…we were A-OK.”

Columbus-headquartered CoverMyMeds helps physicians, pharmacists and their staff secure “electronic prior authorization,” or ePA, from insurance companies to cover medications otherwise not covered by a patient’s plan—and it does it quickly. As of March, CoverMyMeds was integrated with more than 500 electronic health records (EHR) systems and had reached 500,000 provider accounts. The network also includes about 47,000 pharmacies and nearly all health plans. CoverMyMeds’ technology saves providers time—15 minutes per prior authorization request—and providers are taking note, with up to 1,000 new provider accounts added to CoverMyMeds’ numbers each business day.

Read the full story at Columbus CEO.